


Introspection (in Pursuit of Perfection)

by mayaspice



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Eventual Smut, F/F, F/M, Femslash, First Time, Genderbending, Introspection, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Pining, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 15:10:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16221662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayaspice/pseuds/mayaspice
Summary: Rose’s experiences with love and sex and longing deviate somewhat from the average swell but, in her whole nineteen years of life, she can’t seem to put her finger on how exactly. That is, until her Doctor transforms into a woman and suddenly she can’t quite remember how to get oxygen into her body. Female!Ten/Rose.





	Introspection (in Pursuit of Perfection)

**Author's Note:**

> Female!Ten and Rose. Adult. Themes of loneliness, introspection (fancy that) and discovery of self. Written because I believe the world is severely lacking in F!Doctor fic. There are some scenes of Rose and boys/unwanted attention from a teacher that could be dub-con. *also posted on teaspoon under username doctorwhatnow*

In 2002, in the science lab of a South-East London comprehensive secondary school, Rose Tyler chewed her biro and daydreamed about love.

When she was a child, tucked tightly in her bed with a cup of hot chocolate on chilly winter nights, Rose’s mother told her stories of beautiful princesses in ivory towers and brave princes who scaled castle walls. But Rose’s favourite tale had not a single courting royal in sight. No: it was the story of an ordinary man who adored his wife and daughter so much that even his death couldn’t put out the fire of his love.

Of course, Rose had learned about famous romantic couples in her English Literature classes: Orpheus and Eurydice, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, Romeo and Juliet. But the thing is, Rose didn’t want a love that was dependent on rules or social hierarchies and especially not lethal poison. She just wanted a normal, true love.

As she swirled her tongue over her pen lid, she dreamed about wholesome love; the type that made you offer someone the last Malteser or iron their shirts at 11 o’clock on a Sunday night even when you’re knackered. The kind of love that prompted an existential wondering, where you question the point of your very matter on the Earth before you met _the_ one. She even wanted the all-consuming and wallowing love that tore you apart, changed who you are at your core and left you pityingly poetic because, as she well knew, it was better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

The daydreams always came approximately at 10:03 on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. At first, Rose attributed it to the fact that at fifteen years old, she was a developing young woman and therefore had a body that was practically bursting at the seams with hormones. Which was undoubtedly true – no less – but it was also uncoincidental that these yearnings for love coincided with her tri-weekly Physics lessons.

Of note, there was nothing spectacular about Ms. Cairn – the boys in Rose’s class didn’t talk about her the way they talked about Miss Lombard, the P.E teacher who wore bicycle shorts and a very thin sports bra – but Rose still found herself putting in a terrible effort to get out of her Maths lessons early so that she could nab the front desk in the science lab. It wasn’t as though she had to fight anyone for it; her peers couldn’t care less about Physics, but her eagerness to be punctual was an amalgamation of wanting to be close enough to smell Ms. Cairn's floral perfume and a wish that one day she would be brave enough to enter the classroom – in the small window of time between period swap over, while it was devoid of students – and initiate a one-on-one conversation with her.

During her Physics lessons, Rose stared longingly at Ms. Cairn’s long, delicate fingers as they wrote the lesson objectives on the whiteboard. Indubitably, Rose dreamed about sex, as it was something she knew often came hand in hand with romantic love. It was incredibly hard to concentrate when Ms. Cairn’s hair fell _just so_ (she had this wonderful thick, burnt umber hair that cascaded between her shoulders and curled off in every direction. Rose fantasized about lazy Saturday mornings in bed with her where she would dedicate hours to counting every individual silky strand) and sometimes, when Rose surrendered to her daydreams during class, she was snagged back into reality when the Ms. Cairn in her mind – who was slipping her blouse off her shoulder – ebbed away and the Ms. Cairn in front of her stood with a questioning eyebrow and crossed arms.

(One morning when Rose was feeling particularly affected by her longing for love, Ms. Cairn had called on her to answer a question. Rose wasn’t listening because up until that point, she’d been busy studying the lines of Ms. Cairn’s face which appeared and vanished with every new expression. She thought about saying something funny – charming, maybe – but the only thing that her mind could muster was, “You have seventeen freckles across your nose” which was hardly an appropriate response. While Rose balanced in that awful, awkward silence reserved for lovestruck students being called on by the teacher of their affections – her brain waiting for her voice box to wake up – she took the pen out of her mouth only to discover the distinct sharp flavour of ink. Ms. Cairn told her to excuse herself and in the scratched toilet mirror, Rose saw that her entire mouth was black.)

Rose often wished that Ms. Cairn taught Biology and not Physics. She would definitely be able to concentrate if Ms. Cairn spoke about female secondary sex characteristics, which parts did what and how to utilise biological knowledge to access the utmost pleasure and _Rose, why don’t you stay after class, I’ll give you some extracurricular activities_ –

Despite it being glaringly obvious, Rose didn’t equate her daydreams about love with Ms. Cairn’s Physics lessons. Perhaps it was just a result of Rose being in that unnerving, developmental stage of life where sexual perversions bounce around your skull and you assure yourself that everyone is having the same thoughts yet equally, you’ll never voice them aloud, in case it transpires that you’re a pubertal anomaly and consequently get branded as a freak.

But Rose’s blissful ignorance only lasted until the end of Easter term when she received her marked practise Physics exam paper back. She read through Ms. Cairn’s comments (noting the feminine curl of her s’s, the way her y’s and f’s looped) and found herself subconsciously adding, ‘Love, Ms. Cairn x’ at the end of the feedback.

As she stared at the ink drying on the paper, it dawned on her that she was hopelessly in love with her Physics teacher.

***

On the bus home after school, splayed out across the back seats (because they were the cool, older kids) Rose’s friends gossiped about which teachers they fancied.

Everyone concluded that Mr. Kite was the most attractive man they had ever seen. Rose thought she could get away with being silent, as long as she giggled and gasped in the right places, but Shareen caught her eye and asked for her opinion. Rose’s heart thumped against her rib cage. She mumbled something about wanting to get into Mr. Kite’s trousers and the girls erupted into laughter.

Shareen took the lolly pop out of her mouth long enough to say, “God, how fit would it be if a teacher fancied you?”

“That’s the dream,” another girl concurred.

***

Rose knew when men were attractive, of course, and when she looked at Mr. Kite she appreciated the way his dimples appeared when he smiled and the deep timbre of his voice first thing in the mornings but it didn’t make her cheeks explode with colour, like it did so many of the other girls.

No, she much preferred falling victim to blushing when Ms. Cairn caught her staring at a hole in her tights, only visible above the hem of her skirt when she reached up on tiptoes to turn on the equipment cupboard lights.

***

The school’s changing rooms had white walls (well, they were more grey after being subjected to decades of sweaty, undressing teenagers) and unstable wooden benches that would poke a splinter in your thigh if you sat on it bare legged.

After-school gymnastics class finished promptly at 4pm but Rose and her friends stayed behind in the changing rooms while they waited for their bus. Shareen was mid-sentence when a girl from gymnastics entered the room, head locked down in fear, and retrieved the shorts she’d left behind.

“You’re not clever, you know,” Shareen said.

With the shorts back in her possession, the girl continued to stare at the floor as she turned on her heel to make a hasty exit.

“Forgot those on purpose, didn’t you?” Shareen snarled. “Wanted a peek of us getting changed. Dirty dyke.”

As the girl ran the rest of the way to the changing room door, Rose’s friends chortled and praised Shareen.

Rose hung back, her ham sandwich lunch threatening to crawl back up her throat.

***

In her first year of college, Rose smoked behind the bus shelter in her free periods. They would share one poorly-rolled cigarette between three of them, stopping to relight often because Rose’s rolling skills were pitiful at best and yet she was still the most skilled out of all of them.

Her favourite time of year was Christmas because the bitterness in the air and harsh breezes meant that it was difficult to light the cigarette so the three girls would huddle together, hands cupping over lips to block out the wind. The other girls’ festive lipgloss would stick to the cigarette filter and Rose would taste vanilla every time she took a drag. She convinced herself that it was like kissing.

On a Wednesday morning in December, Rose’s friend passed her a cigarette and said with a wink, “I saw Mr. Masey staring at you the other day.”

Rose had noticed it too but pretended that she didn’t because with some things, if you never say them out loud you can convince yourself they’re not true.

But when she caught Mr. Masey’s eyes lingering too long on her again, it was impossible to ignore.

***

Too often, Mr. Masey would ask Rose to read passages from the text book aloud.

“Stand up and speak clearly to the class,” he would order her (though he never made anyone else stand up) and then sink back in his chair. He’d get this look in his eyes, like he was hungry and waiting and Rose’s mouth would dry up because she worried what his hands were doing hidden beneath the desk.

When she curled back up in her chair, heart racing and tears stinging her eyes, feeling the burn of Mr. Masey’s eyes on the top of her head, she distracted herself by turning to the back page of her exercise book and writing faintly in pencil, “Love, Ms. Cairn x” over and over and over again.

***

Rose let boys in her class undress her and explore her body with their mouths. The encounters mostly took place in dank, messy bedrooms while the boy’s parents were away. Amongst uttered unfulfilled promises of pleasure, Rose sprawled herself on a bed and watched the muscles of the boys’ backs gradually stiffen and then shake above her. Her mind wandered to things she found more appealing: what she would be having for dinner; the latest shocking sub-plot on EastEnders; her plans for the weekend.

While she stared at white, artex ceilings ( _that swirl looks like a fish trapped in a net_ ) she wondered why the world was overpopulated when sex was so dull.

***

There were late nights, around Shareen’s house with a stolen bottle of vodka from her parent’s alcohol cupboard, when Rose and her friends would crowd around the dusty computer screen and watch pornography together. In the films, the women would scream and cry with pleasure, leaving bright red welts down the men’s backs with their nails. While the other girls laughed at the women’s moans, Rose contemplated if sex could ever be that good or if it was all just acting. When she felt the buzz of alcohol-induced confidence, she thought about telling the girls how unsatisfied boys made her feel. But before she could get the words out, the sober part of her concluded that if the rest of her friends were okay with the way boys shoved their tongues down their throats then it should be good enough for her, too.

It took exactly three years for Rose to figure out that, actually, that wasn’t good enough at all.

***

By the time she reached nineteen, she’d found a boy who made her feel appeased. Mickey was thoughtful and nice and normal and that was okay.

During her late-night shifts at the department store – when she’d already folded the jeans twenty-three times over – Rose unfocused her eyes and pictured her life as a graph (drawn by Ms. Cairn, obviously. Even though her secondary school crush was four years past, that pesky little teacher still managed to wiggle her way back into Rose’s consciousness, sometimes even when Mickey was panting expletives into her neck as he pushed in and out of her) and realised, sadly, that it was a very boring, definitely average, straight line. Nothing outstanding. Nothing abominable.

Rose came to the sombre conclusion that she was destined to stay in retail forever, pop out a couple of kids by the time she was twenty-five and live the remainder of her years in a rented flat three doors down from her mother.

One evening, when Rose was feeling overwhelmed with being underwhelmed, she confided in her mother.

“I feel like I’m not living. Sort of like I’m a kitchen appliance on standby, like my body moves on its own, without me thinking about it. I don’t think I’m happy. I want something more.”

Jackie scoffed and said she should count herself damn lucky, since one of the kids she’d gone to school with died of blood cancer, two were sentenced to ten years in prison and one had her home repossessed.

“A boring life is better than a sad life,” Jackie said and stormed out of the room.

It made Rose feel bad – selfish even – that there she was with a roof over her head, food to eat, people who loved her, and it still wasn’t enough. She decided then that she should be content with an unimpressive, ordinary life, because after all, aren’t most people?

That was, until a man in a leather jacket and cropped black hair came into her life and told her to run.

***

And then, all of a sudden, the average life that seemed all-too-inevitable was no longer her only option.

When the Doctor asked her to travel with him, Rose wanted to leap into his arms and spend forever thanking him for saving her. But Jackie’s words swam around her mind and guilt prickled at her skin. Before she knew it, she’d declined his offer and watched remorsefully from the side-lines as the blue box gradually disappeared. The whirling sound of the TARDIS echoed around her and she knew she would be haunted by the sound until the very second she died. In that single moment her life with two kids and a flat didn’t seem so bad because then she was faced with turning her self-loathing towards Mickey and her mother, blaming them for keeping her shackled in the confines of reality and she’d probably end up pushing them away until she was completely on her own, an alcoholic spinster, relegated to a life of isolation only to die in some unspectacular way, like choking on her own vomit without even a beloved pet to sniff questionably at her corpse.

She always did have an overactive imagination.

Rose vowed to herself, then, that if another opportunity to escape mundanity ever came up again, she would take it in a heartbeat; no matter who it might hurt.

That’s when the Doctor reappeared. She took one look at Mickey – poor, good, big-hearted Mickey – and decided settling just wasn’t her forte anymore.

***

After one week with the Doctor – relative time – Rose observed herself in the mirror and decided that if she were to die within the day, she would die happy.

As she got to know the Doctor, which happened quite quickly (something about being convinced of your imminent death makes you awfully sentimental and openhearted to strangers) she began to realise there was something special about him.

He was the manliest man she had ever known. (The irony wasn’t lost on her that the manliest man she’d ever known was, in fact, an alien.) He wasn’t particularly cool, or hairy, or deep-voiced, or any of the other things that people usually associated with manliness but there was just something about him that unapologetically declared I Am a Man. Maybe that was what had been missing with the boys before: they were just that. Boys. Maybe what she needed was a _man_.

In the depths of the night, enshrouded by the darkness of her bedroom on the TARDIS, Rose imagined what it would be like to make love to the Doctor. She pictured his hands slipping under her pyjama trousers, his thumb swiping bluntly over her clit while he whispered, low and desperate in her ear. The Doctor seemed like the type of bloke who would put real effort into pleasing a woman; someone who asked _is this okay?_ and _tell me what you like_ and maybe he wouldn’t judge her if she told him she didn’t want him inside of her. Or maybe, _oh maybe_ , sex with a Time Lord wouldn’t involve any form of put-your-bits-in-my-bits. Sex that she’d enjoy. Now there was a thought that made her giddy. So giddy, in fact, that she worried something was wrong with her, if a wire had snapped in her brain, or if a part of her fundamental makeup was broken, because there was that exquisite, brave, exciting man and she didn’t want him in the way she was told she should.

***

The Doctor gave Rose everything she told herself she could never have. Every day with him was filled with adventure and uncertainty and fear and euphoria and moral reward and to Rose it was a natural high.

There was this feeling that started to develop in her chest as the months passed by. It was warm and bubbly, like how you feel when you get a bit silly from staying in the sun too long. In her limited experience, she thought – dare she even think it – it might be love.

Rose wondered if you could love someone and not want to sleep with them.

(There’d been one night when she’d had a bit too much to drink in Triketa City on the planet of Mass. She wanted to show the Doctor how grateful she was and – as she was wont to think, what with her past experiences of what men expected from women – that meant offering her body.

She woke in the morning and her bedroom was so loud, _no_ , the noise was coming from inside her head, and the Doctor gently opened her door, one hand holding a cup of tea and the other a bucket. He smiled at her sadly and shame seeped through as remnants of memories of the night before came to mind. A drunken confession. A tear down her cheek. The pressure of a push against her shoulder and a chorus of _No, Rose. Not like this._ )

***

“New teeth, that’s weird. So, where was I? Oh, that’s right. Barcelona.”

The Doctor literally vanished in front of Rose’s eyes and in his place stood an entirely different person.

Tall. Slim. Narrow hips. Angular cheekbones. Brown pinstripes covered looming shoulders and frazzled, uncontrollable hair curved over a pale, freckled forehead.

Rose felt like someone had opened up her limbs and replaced her blood with bricks. She was heavy, unbalanced and reached out to the TARDIS pillar for support.

The person before her was not her Doctor. For starters, she was a woman. A dazzling woman – yes –nevertheless, not her faithful intergalactic travelling partner. She observed as the woman ran her hands over her torso as if she’d never seen it before, and tried to think of what the Doctor would do had he been there. Keeping a vigilant eye locked firmly on the stranger, Rose started to craft a plan of action in her mind.

The woman lifted her pinstriped suit jacket and shirt to show her abdomen. “Look,” she said. “No more hairy belly.”

Rose stared. Attempted to mentally take inventory of the TARDIS console room for items in her vicinity that could be used as a weapon.

The woman moved closer. Rose’s fingers tightened around the pillar.

“Oh, this is weird,” the woman frowned, leaning probably too close to Rose’s face. “I can see myself in your pupils.” The woman shook her head and tendrils of full, flicky hair fell over her face. She smiled. “This hair is ridiculous. I love it.”

Rose loved it too. Her fingers were practically burning with a desire to reach out and thread through it. She scolded herself internally, concluding that her sudden intimate interest in the woman was a result of some mind-altering gas that the stranger was secreting so that she could drag her back to her colony and kill her. Nothing to do with plain human attraction. Not at all.

“You look a bit green, Rose. Is everything okay? Why are you hiding behind that pillar? Come and take a peek!” The woman lifted a thin, hairless hand towards Rose and she flinched. “Oh, right! Sorry. I got a little carried away there. No big deal, really, Time Lords– Time Ladies?” Her head cocked up in thought. She scrunched her nose then snapped her eyes back to Rose. “Time _Whatevers_ regenerate when they’re on the brink of death. I should’ve told you before, given you time to get used to it, I know, but in my defence it’s never really too drastic. It’s usually just a couple of inches taken or added from my height and transferred to my waist. But this,” she ran her hands over her hips and smiled in fascination. “This is something else.”

“So, you’re saying,” Rose said, slowly. “That you’re the Doctor?”

“Oh yes. I’m still me. Just a whole lot…” Her hands skimmed her own backside. “Curvier.”

Rose continued to gawp, expecting a member of an unknown alien species or the Doctor or a Slitheen to unzip the woman’s body and step out with pointed fingers and shout _Gotcha!_ But that didn’t happen.

The woman took one cautious step forward and slipped her hand into Rose’s.

“Rose,” she said, low and soothing. “It’s me. Really.” She fiddled with Rose’s fingers. “I saved your life in the basement of Henrik’s department store. You saved mine in the Game Station just hours ago.” Rose’s fingers were stiffening in her grasp. “You like chips and cups of tea and when I first met you, you lived in flat 36 in the Powell estate with your mum Jackie.” The woman paused for the realisation to swoop over Rose’s face and when it never came, she rolled her eyes. “In your front room on the third row of the bookshelf there’s a framed photo of you and your dad on the beach and if you take the photograph out, on the back there’s a note that says Pete and Rose, 1990. My two loves.”

“Oh my God, are you a stalker?” Rose gasped as she snatched her hand out of the woman’s grasp, walking backwards towards the TARDIS door.

“No,” the woman whined, running a frustrated hand through her hair. “Rose, come on. It’s me. Can’t you tell?”

She kept striding forward, arms outstretched and Rose – in want of a better weapon – took off her shoe and thrust it out aggressively. The woman raised her hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Tell me what you’ve done with the Doctor.”

“Rose, you saw me change. I did it right in front of you. It’s called regeneration.”

Rose launched her trainer at the woman and it hit her in the shin. “Ow!”

“What I saw was the Doctor disappearing and you taking over his body.” She extracted her other shoe and held it up, ready to launch another attack.

“Okay, okay, okay.” The woman spluttered. “I’m going to tell you something that I know about you that you don’t even know I know.” Rose raised the shoe. “No, no! Listen. It’s less confusing than it sounds.”

The trainer stilled, but remained aimed, in Rose’s hand.

“In secondary school you had a crush on your Physics teacher. Ms. Cairn. Long, brown hair, soft, supple hands and– oh, what was it you said? _Legs for days_.”

“Oh my God.” Rose said, chest heaving with fear. “You _are_ a stalker.”

The second trainer was thrown with more aggression than the first and it hit the woman square in the shoulder.

“Rose! That hurt.” The woman rubbed her arm. “You told me when we were in Triketa City. You’d drunk – oh God knows what you’d drunk – but it was strong stuff. You were gushing. All this stuff about me and you and your feelings and then you told me about Ms. Cairn.”

Rose gulped as she remembered waking up in the morning, groggy-headed and embarrassed, with memories of drunken proclamations but not quite enough detail to be sure exactly what they were.

“The next morning, I came into your room with a bucket,” she continued. “And then you chucked up all the alcohol and it was… it was purple with blue specks in.”

“Doctor?” she whispered.

The Doctor’s shoulders loosened and she let out a deep sigh. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“I can’t,” Rose walked over to her, reached hesitant fingers to her chin. “This is crazy.”

“Would you expect anything less?” The Doctor laughed before shifting away from Rose entirely too quickly, leaving Rose’s hand cupped in mid-air, as though she was caressing the cheek of a ghost.

The Doctor maniacally pressed buttons, pulled levers and twisted knobs on the TARDIS dashboard.

“This is going to take some getting used to.” Rose said.

“You’re telling me.” The Doctor scoffed. She turned a few more dials before her hand froze on a switch. “I’m so sorry, Rose, I was trying really hard not to do this but you have to excuse me, just for a moment.”

The Doctor’s fingers grasped at her own chest, moving her breasts in circles. “Wow.” The Doctor looked down at her chest and bounced gently on her feet, her breasts moving slightly beneath the confines of her suit jacket. “This is phenomenal. Although, you’re going to have to advise me on the whole underwear situation because really,” the Doctor pointed at herself. “No clue.”

Rose’s cheeks felt like they’d been doused with gasoline and set alight. The very word _underwear_ coming out of the Doctor’s mouth was flush-inducing enough but even more so because that meant she must’ve been thinking about Rose in underwear and then suddenly Rose was thinking of _her_ in underwear and then there were too many half-dressed people in Rose’s imagination and as she caught the Doctor’s eye, she blushed harder at how unaffected by the subject matter the Doctor was.

That evening, when Rose was in bed, she stared at the ceiling (that was delightedly not white artex) and laughed into the black night when she thought about how completely mental her life was. And how she wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world.

***

As expected, it took Rose a fair while to get used to the new version of her Doctor. It wasn’t just her body either; there was a new voice (pitch, intonation, accent), new clothes (a distractingly well-fitting suit), new hair (oh, God, the _bounds_ of lush caramel hair), new habits (most notably: licking things and crinkling her nose) and a host of other new’s that Rose was endeavouring to keep track of.

She didn’t imagine it would ever be possible, but somehow Rose was even more comfortable with the Doctor in her new body. She initiated the winding of their fingers more often, she wasn’t hesitant about nuzzling into the Doctor’s side on cold planets and she regularly pictured the Doctor in her underwear (and eventually she advanced to not feeling so guilty about it). As she grew more confident about the source of the tight warmth in her chest, it became increasingly difficult to repress the feelings of gratitude and appreciation that shot through her body when she was around the Doctor. And if she didn’t know any better, she would say that she recognised the occasional glint in the Doctor’s eyes, because it looked terribly close to something like love.

After a notably conducive adventure – involving a very powerful glue gun, a secret stash of millions of alien currency and a sentient cactus – Rose and the Doctor bounded onto the TARDIS.

“But I don’t understand,” said Rose, finger poking in thought at her mouth. “Cactus told us about the money his owner was hiding, right?”

“Right.”

“But you said Cactus’ owner changed his biological makeup to make obedience to him override the honesty that comes to the species naturally. So how could Cactus physically tell us about the money if he was programmed to put subservience to his owner first?”

The Doctor sighed. “You can cheat death, that’s for sure, but you can’t change the way you’re wired altogether. The honesty that’s inherent to Cactus’ species is too powerful to abolish. It’s just the way he is.”

Rose stared forward, expressionless, which the Doctor misinterpreted as confusion (when really, it was realisation) so she went on to explain how Cacti were exploited in the alien society because of their genetic honesty and then she got carried away and launched into a description of what the chemical structure of an honesty chromosome looked like. Rose wasn’t really listening, not entirely, because the words were unfamiliar and the Doctor’s excitement about proteins and molecules was radiating this glow across her skin which was impossible not to admire.

Evidently, Rose had a soft spot for pretty women who were passionate about science.

***

They were having a night-off – as it were – when they came achingly close to kissing.

In the evening, they walked the streets of some planet with 19 syllables that Rose couldn’t remember off the top of her head, which looked uncannily like Regency London (except that everyone had raised bumps covering their skin and a rather technologically-advanced-looking monocle attached to one eye). The night consisted of trekking to the top of a hill north of the city (suspiciously named Errmipso Hill…and yet the Doctor still insisted it had nothing to do with Primrose Hill) and observing the locals.

“This reminds me of home.” Rose said at about 10pm when the volume of people in the park thinned out.

“Does that make you sad?”

She thought about it for a couple of seconds. “I don’t think so.”

Rose turned to the Doctor and saw her eyes shimmer in the twilight.

“Are you all right?” Rose asked tentatively.

“Me? Oh, yes. Right as rain.”

“You know, you can tell me if you’re upset. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

The Doctor’s face sunk and it scared Rose. She was a withered, tortured soul. The downturn of her lips made her look almost as old as she really was.

“Thinking of home makes me a little sad. And it makes me sad that thinking of home doesn’t make you sad.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Meanings are different to different people. Subjectivity. A bittersweet thing.”

Rose bit down on her lip and fiddled with her fingers because she couldn’t think of anything fitting, or even appropriate, to say. The Doctor was the first to speak again as lumpy, bespectacled teenagers laughed and wrestled on the grass behind them.

“Sometimes I feel very alone. Even in a room filled with people. Even though I have friends spotted throughout infinite time and space.” She picked up a blade of grass and peeled it. “I wish there was just one more, you know? Just one other Time Lord.”

Rose nodded understandingly. Except she could never even begin to understand.

“I feel the opposite.” Rose admitted. “There are seven billion people on Earth and not one of them gets me. I think I’m the black sheep of the human race.”

The Doctor offered Rose a small, melancholy smile and took her hand. The irony of a lonely Time Lady searching for a partner and a human searching for a different kind of love, sitting side by side on a foreign planet, lightyears away from anyone else they knew and cared for.

The Doctor was hurting and Rose was hurting, and even though they were hurting for different reasons, Rose thought it might be nice if they could hurt together.

Seeking some kind of resolution, Rose inched her face towards the Doctor’s carefully, expecting that dreaded moment when she would stand up abruptly, dust off her trousers and drag Rose back to the TARDIS. But she never did. Their lips were centimetres apart, close enough for Rose to feel the heat of the Doctor’s breath on her chin, and when Rose’s hand settled on the Doctor’s knee, she let out a pained sigh. The Doctor’s breath hitched in her throat as Rose stilled before her, silently suggesting that the rest of the kiss was her call. When no kiss came, Rose opened her eyes and saw the Doctor frowning as if she was in the frontline of an internal battle.

So, with a heavy heart, she retracted and fell back into the grass. It had taken Rose a long twenty years to accept the feelings and thoughts that consumed her. She figured it wouldn’t be fair to rush the Doctor either.

When the Doctor opened her eyes and saw Rose draped on the grass, she collapsed beside her, pressing her ear to the single beating heart in her chest.

“Thank you.”

Rose nuzzled her lips into the mop of unruly hair. “It’s okay.”

***

There were many traits that Rose Tyler prided herself on having. She was creative, and often used her creativity and initiative to find uncommon solutions to problems, she was a fast learner (life on the TARDIS had brought that to her attention), she made an absolutely cracking cup of tea and she was patient. She was patient, that was for sure, but she was no saint. So, when three months passed after her and the Doctor’s trip to Regency-London-That-Wasn’t-Regency-London, and the Doctor still hadn’t kissed her, she began to feel her patience wearing alarmingly thin.

Firstly, there was the issue of time. Three months was a long time to wait for just one kiss (even though she knew it would be well worth enduring even those seemingly-eternal nights when she couldn’t stop thinking about how half of her bed seemed so empty) but what was proving to be a bigger obstacle was the Doctor’s behaviour towards her. In those three months, the Doctor and Rose had had countless near misses (near kisses) and it occurred to Rose that being trapped in a fortuitously confined hiding space, in the midst of escaping aliens, was something that happened to them quite often. During those hushed hideouts, Rose would use all of her inner conduct to keep her hands and mouth very much to herself, even when she caught the Doctor staring unabashedly at her lips.

Towards the end of the three months, Rose considered trying to supress the feelings inside of her altogether, because this voice that said the Doctor wasn’t interested started to burn in the back of her mind. It was a good thing, really, that she hadn’t been successful on the suppressing feelings front because one morning after Rose had dressed, hair still damp from the shower, the Doctor burst into the console room.

“We both know I’m not very good at this romantic malarkey,” she announced. “But I’ve wanted this for so long. And I knew you wanted it too, which made it all the more difficult because I was fighting against it for both of us. But I’m finished with saying no. I’m done with the grieving and the self-punishment and the repression because you’re here and even though you’re not a Time Lord or Lady… you make me better, Rose.”

She closed the distance between them in two desperate strides and then they were wrapped together, tangled somehow (Rose wasn’t quite sure how but it all happened so quickly and easily that it couldn’t be wrong) and the Doctor’s lips were moving against Rose’s and Rose’s hands were finally in the depths of that ridiculously inviting hair. When the Doctor slipped her tongue into Rose’s mouth, they gasped together, pulling frantically at one another in an attempt to get closer but things like bones and flesh and bodies were getting in the way. Rose knew logically, emphatically, irrevocably, that it was impossible to feel the weight of a lifetime of uncertainty flood out of her system but somehow – against all laws of physics and reason – she did. The Doctor tasted like a well-awaited answer. They stopped kissing out of a necessity for oxygen than anything else, and as their foreheads pressed against one another they smiled from ear to ear.

With an astounding amount of self-control (that neither of them was aware they possessed), they decided that to move to the bedroom would be reckless and impulsive and if they had gone that long without kissing one another, they could wait a little while longer for the rest.

But because they were mere agents of love and desire and passion and all that other good stuff, a little while longer turned out to be just 23 hours.

***

Rose couldn’t imagine anything more inspiring or beautiful or pure than being touched by the Doctor. It was in an utterly different realm to being touched by the boys before her. The Doctor’s hands were gentle yet firm, exploratory yet knowledgeable, fast but achingly slow. Every brush of her fingertip was choreographed; every breath was calculated. Wandering hands strayed over untouched territory and eyes widened with every discovery that was made.

Once their clothes were off and they collapsed on the bed, the Doctor on top of Rose, Rose linked her arms around the Doctor’s back and squeezed. They stayed there for a few beats, their breasts against one another, their thighs slotted together, Rose’s nose on the Doctor’s shoulder, inhaling the scent of _just right_. Rose wanted to ask the Doctor if there was a way to stay like that forever, if there was some intricate formula that the Doctor could input on the TARDIS dashboard to suspend them eternally in that place where all that mattered was the way they held each other, where every heartbeat and inhale and blink could be felt by the other. But in her mind, Rose forgot how to construct a coherent sentence so instead of making her request, she planted a kiss on the Doctor’s neck.

“You’re all warm and smooth,” the Doctor purred.

“So are you.”

They giggled together then and Rose felt sickly feminine which made her revel in the fact that she was at present, directly engaged in one of the biggest celebrations of the female sex (quite literally).

Inquisitive, demure touches made way for dominant, studied techniques (Rose learned that she could make the Doctor let out a chest-rumbling groan when she pressed the flat of her tongue down on her nipple) and before too long, the Doctor nestled herself between Rose’s thighs and ravenously worked Rose to her peak.

“Oh God, you’re going to make me come,” Rose gasped, fingers grasping the loose bedsheet. She looked down her body and when she caught the Doctor’s eye, her tongue attached to the very centre of her being, her head lulled back between her shoulders.

“Good,” the Doctor mumbled against her, pausing for a chuckle. “That’s sort of the point.”

Rose thrust up into the Doctor’s mouth, pulled the thick, brown hair closer into her core and groaned, “Don’t stop.”

The Doctor – not one for wanting to let others down – continued her technique _in, curl, out, lick, in, curl, out, suck_ until Rose’s insides were squeezing and pulsing around her fingers and she was writhing against the pillows, her own trembling fingers gently caressing her chest as she floated on the remains of her orgasm.

The Doctor inconspicuously wiped her chin clean of Rose’s residue (though she could’ve been more overt, since Rose’s eyes were closed as she hummed lazily in satisfaction) and kissed her way up towards the source of the crooning. She placed a single kiss against Rose’s lips.

When Rose gained some composure, and her limbs no longer felt like weighty, boneless noodles, she staggered up on shaky knees and whimpered in the Doctor’s ear, “Turn over.”

Then the Doctor was on her hands and knees and Rose was behind her, damp palms brushing over expanses of bare, supple skin. Rose pressed a line of sloppy kisses up the Doctor’s spine until the front of her thighs were pressed flush to the back of the Doctor’s. She gripped the Doctor’s skinny hips and thrust fruitlessly against her arse a couple of times, imagined what it would look like if she had a cock that she could sink into the depths of her. Settling for extremities she did have, Rose slipped her fingers inside the Doctor slowly, watching as the dark folds of skin puckered and clamped around her. She thrust her hips forward in time with her fingers, as though they were attached to her groin, and twisted the ends of the Doctor’s locks in her other fist. Then there was the sound of slaps and squelches and gasps and grunts; a soundtrack of a lifetime of built up love and pining. Rose felt the Doctor’s walls flutter around her so, somewhat reluctantly, she released the Doctor’s hair and moved her digits to that wonderful nub just north of where her other hand was pumping in and out and with that, the Doctor’s muscles tightened and quaked around her fingers – with a cacophony of _Oh, Rose. Oh God, yes, Rose, Rose, Rose, that’s_ – and the friction of the back of her hand against herself made Rose come again.

They tumbled onto the mattress together, a mess of sweat and heaving chests, and held one another as they sunk back down to Earth. And in that tangled heap upon the bed, Rose finally understood. She understood why people cheated on their spouses; why people paid for sex; why boys were obsessed with girls; why love was the meaning of life; why sex was the biggest trade on Earth, because there was no feeling that compared to having love so physically and intimately projected onto you. The boys Rose had been with before seemed insubstantial and irrelevant – in fact, a lot of her life did – as right there in that moment Rose felt absolved. Reborn.

The smell of sex clung to the particles in the room, making the air surrounding them sticky and stuffy. The Doctor shifted herself (she wished pins and needles didn’t exist) and their skin peeled off one another. Rose curled a strand of the Doctor’s hair around her index finger and brought it to her lips.

“So now that you’re a woman does that mean you’re a lesbian?” she asked groggily.

“That’s a good question. I don’t know. Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s okay.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a density to the silence then, like the unspoken knowledge between them is hanging in the air. Sometimes admissions are scary.

“Sexuality is fluid, anyway. Give it another 40 years for where you’re from and sexual labels will just,” the Doctor waved her hand in the air. “Disappear.”

“You reckon?”

“Absolutely. Everyone will just shag everyone and the world will be a better place for it.”

Rose didn’t laugh, though she knew she was supposed to.

There were a catalogue of questions churning their way around her mind and alternatively, a dizzying lack of answers. She had to remind herself that in that moment, it didn’t matter too much because the Doctor was drawing lazy circles into her shoulder and if she’d learned anything about life at the tender age of twenty, it was that regardless of how hard you willed answers to come, they just simply couldn’t be rushed.


End file.
